LEARNING ABOUT CHEMOTHERAPY REGIMENS.

LEARNING ABOUT CHEMOTHERAPY REGIMENS. When Mary Jane was being treated for breast cancer fifteen years ago, I learned that there were different drugs and different combinations of drugs to choose among and also that for each combination of drugs there were different regimens to choose among —how frequently the drugs were given, in what order, for how long. There didn’t seem to a lot of information about the success of the different regimens or about whether the characteristics of the tumor affected that success. There was a tumor registry for the thousands of new cases each year, but there didn’t seem to be any systematic effort to examine all the data. I think that that is still true. I posted here about all the off-label uses of cancer drugs (estimated to be about 75% of cancer drug use) for which the results of treatment are apparently not systematically studied. It seems that there is a lot more statistical analysis of the performance of baseball players—some of which I have posted on—than there is of the results of medical treatments.